Related Tags:

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta) – According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, knowing your body mass index, achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, and getting regular physical activity are all actions you can take for yourself to combat obesity.

And now the same can be said for monkeys.

For 25 years researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had a group of rhesus monkeys under observation. Half the monkeys were on a selected diet to eat as much as they desired for the rest of their lives; the other half were stuck on a nutritious, but heavily restricted diet consisting of 30 percent fewer calories.

The controlled monkeys, which were on the unrestricted diet, had almost three times greater risk of age-related death and disease than those that were on the calorie restricted diet.

According to the study, these diseases included diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, brain atrophy, sarcopenia, and bone loss.

The researchers do not recommend you go and cut your diet by 30 percent fewer calories. “It’s a research tool, not a lifestyle recommendation,” assistant professor Rozalyn Anderson, who was involved in the study, said in a press release obtained by the Verge. “We are not studying it so people can go out and do it, but to delve into the underlying causes of age-related disease susceptibility.”